The Substance of Goddesses: Sanford Biggers’s Lady Interbellum

Contemporary sculptors such as Fred Wilson, Beya Gille Gacha, and Yinka Shonibare have all recently created artworks that re-imagine classical marble statues of the goddess Venus by using different media (e.g., painted bronze, beads, fiberglass). How and why, in the 21^st century, are global artists adapting statues of the ancient Roman love deity, and what role do material interventions play? This paper focuses on Sanford Biggers’s Lady Interbellum (2020), a life-size nude female form crouching in the familiar iconography of Venus interrupted while bathing. Although the sculpture’s body is naturalistic, with flesh realistically creasing on the belly, the face is in the abstracted form of a Pwo mask created by the Chokwe peoples in central and southern Africa. The sculpture’s medium is unpainted white marble, instead of the polychromed surface of the Roman statues or the wood and metallic accents of the masks that inspired the head. In this paper, I apply a classical reception theoretical approach to explore Biggers’s challenges to concepts of race, beauty, memory, and history that classical statues have been used to uphold. I argue that Biggers draws attention to the racial biases of Art History’s Euro-centric canon and privileging of marble, while responding to the history of Academic art replication and museum curation, which resulted in African masks located in ethnographic or natural history rather than art museums. He engages centuries-old debates about ancient polychromy, which was suppressed to favor whiteness; and colonial appropriation of artifacts, in compelling ways that have not before been identified.